Hello,

I am trying to design and make a custom PC case for mATX mainboard, with DC/DC power supply so it will be powered using external power brick, in order to minimize the size, and which will have ISA sound card, P3 1GHz or better, Voodoo (or V2), low profile ISA sound card, laptop CD and FDD drives.

It will have dimensions of about 11x230x300cm, so it will be much smaller than mini-ATX case, I will be able then to put it next to the monitor on my desk, or under it and use KVM switch with that.

To sum up, i am trying to build an ultimate small-sized Retro-PC for games from 1990 to 2002, using Win98. I want to mount the Voodoo horizontally, using PCI extension cable, and maybe do the same with the AGP card (but i would like to use something low-profile)

(i used different mainboard on this photo, but it has the same size)

I am using MS-6198 mainboard with Via694X chipset in mATX form factor (it has built-in memory interleave option so you dont need to use viaenabler patch, that's great, 430/480 memory bandwidth),
and it seems it has problems with newer graphic cards. It is rock stable with GF3 Ti200 with passive cooling, i ran 3dmark2001 for several hours and no crashes at all, and it gets around 4600 pts, which is pretty good (it can even run GTA:SA in 800x600 with pretty smooth framerate), but the problem is that this card is pretty big and I would have to put it horizontally, just like Voodoo, and using both cards in such configuration could make some airflow problems.

I bought used low-profile Radeon 9600 Mobility AGP card (yep, that's true! its mobile version...), which has passive cooling and gets around 6000 points in 3dmark2001. But, the problem is, that it causes the computer to freeze a lot... 3dmark is locking up after few minutes of testing. I had similar problems with GF6200 64-bit, so I guess that graphic cards without 3.3V signalling and with AGP 4x or 8x native support are problematic. I had forced the mainboard to use 2x AGP in BIOS, or even 1x, but it didn't help.

Does anyone have such problems in motherboards with that chipset? I have updated the BIOS, tried to use manual AGP comp driving setting but I couldn't find good settings. That GF3 is fine, but I would like to put something smaller with similar performance, in order to improve the airflow, and I would have to use more modern graphic cards. Are there any other passive cooled cards, which will be as good as GF3, but in low-profile form and compatible with that mainboard?